|
Article Excerpt
Painted in 1781, then often reproduced, Fuseli's The Nightmare became widely influential. Its real context is the "Demonism" current in contemporary "Gothick" literature, and the key to this is Fuseli's haunting "incubus," first described in the Malleus Maleficarum.
**********
It has been argued in various monographs (see: Antal; Schiff, 1741-1825; Schiff et al.; Schiff and Viotto; and Tomory) that, among the many artists working in eighteenth-century Britain, perhaps it was Henry Fuseli (1741-1825) who was the most inventive and most formidably endowed intellectually. Clearly, his works, known practically everywhere through engravings, did leave their distinctive mark on artists as diverse as William Blake and Eugene Delacroix. In any event, it is unquestionable that Fuseli's most renowned painting is The Nightmare, about which, accordingly, there is much modern scholarship (Chappell; Janson; Kalman; Moffitt, "Malleus"; Powell; Schneck). Painted in 1781, it quickly became immensely popular after being exhibited at the Royal Academy in London the following year. Fuseli subsequently made other close variations on what proved to be for him a most profitable theme, and engravings copying its distinctive composition (Powell 97-100) further spread the fame-and increasing influence-of Fu seli's The Nightmare throughout continental Europe (77-82).
Specifically citing Fuseli's The Nightmare, literary historian Philip W. Martin places this famous image in its wider cultural context, as establishing a defining motif in the contemporary "Gothick" novel:
The common meaning of nightmare (a frightening dream) is frequently evoked in the use of such dreams in [eighteenth-century] Gothic fiction where they are often prescient. [...] In its sense of a distressing or disturbingly prescient dream, the nightmare is a common device in Gothic fiction, where it also refers to a state between sleeping and waking, or indeed, death and life [and] nightmares have a particular place in what might be called the mythology of the Gothic imagination, for alongside the nightmares in the text, there are those which mark its beginnings. Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764), for example, had its origins in a dream the author experienced at Strawberry Hill, his Gothic residence. [...l Mary Shelley, perhaps most intriguingly of all, marks the moment of the monster's creation in Frankenstein (1818) with a nightmare [of] the demon of [Dr.] Frankenstein's creation which is to haunt him: "He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside. [...]I opened mine in terror. The idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill of fear ran through me, and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around. [...]I could not so easily get rid of my hideous phantom; still it haunted me."
(qtd. in Mulvey-Roberts 164-65)
As I hardly need to add, the "dream-motif" per se is a standard literary motif, having prestigious classical precedents--Apuleius, Boethius, Cicero, Homer, Lucian, Macrobius, Nonnus, for example--and many adaptations since the Renaissance, many of these belonging to the strictly visual arts (see Gandolfo).
In his Life of Fuseli, John Knowles listed all the pictures by Fuseli exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1774 and 1825 (see Janson 73), and--except for The Nightmare--all these sixty-nine paintings were then known to have had a familiar literary source, including Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Spenser, Milton, and Shakespeare. A modern case study of one of Fuseli's Shakespearean adaptations, his illustrations for A Midsummer Nights Dream, now stresses the painter's emphasis on the supernatural elements, above all, Hexenwesen 'witchcraft,' including an incubus in the context of a Nachtmahr or Traumhexen 'nightmare,' or 'bewitched dreams,' also Damonen 'demons,' Feen 'fairies,' Phantome 'phantoms,' Kobolden 'goblins,' for example (Schiff, Sommernachtstraum). But, as H.W. Janson observes, nonetheless, "No such [literary] source is indicated for The Nightmare" (77). His other observation was to note that, while this famous image has been reproduced countless times, alas, this has been "with a minimum of analytical comment. One might almost say of Fuseli's The Nightmare what Mark Twain said of the weather--everybody is talking about it, but nobody does anything about it" (77).
Hence, previously a work that had continually puzzled scholars, a study published in 1990, demonstrated that all the iconographic particulars of Fuseli's endlessly discussed The Nightmare directly reflect commonplace "haunting" motifs encountered in the classic (actually late mediaeval) literature of witchcraft (Moffitt, "Malleus"). This recognition of Fuseli's actual literary sources reveals the exact meaning of (and means for) Fuseli's proud boast to have served as "the primary hobgoblin-painter to the devil" (qtd. in Schiff, Sommernachtstraum 19). All this fits in with another recognized trait of contemporary "Gothick" fiction, and, as observed by feminist historian Faye Ringel, "witches--mostly female, imagined and historical--have played the following roles in Gothic literature: divination; communing with spirits of the dead; maleficia and heresy; sexual magic; healing and white magic" (qtd. in Mulvey-Roberts 254).
Since the publication of my essay in 1990 entitled Malleus Maleficarum, another piece of iconographical evidence has surfaced that considerably reinforces the original argument; this is the frontispiece to Johann Webster's Untersuchung der vermeintlichen und sogennanten Hexereien (published in 1716), also illustrating (literally) another "Haunting Nightmare," just as did Fuseli (see Halbey 80-81). Anticipating by seventy-five years the content (and to some degree even the form) of The Nightmare, the inscription attached to Webster's engraving, showing a Fuseli-like sleeper bewitched in his bed by nocturnal and nightmarish apparitions, is self-explanatory: "Hier sieht man sonnenklar, da[beta] Hexen in der Welt / Da eines Traumers Kopffwohl tausend in sich hailt" 'Here one sees, clear as daylight, just how there are witches in the world, and how a thousand such might be contained within the mind of a dreamer.' As shown by the title of Webster's book (translated as An Investigation into Imaginary, So-called Witc hcraft), the author's appraisal of all such Hexereien is sceptical, an attitude that is generally characteristic of enlightened" eighteenth-century attitudes regarding such occult pursuits. Following a sceptical precedent set by Johannes Weyer (in his De praetigiis daemonium [On Witchcraft]), this questioning approach was shared by Webster's predecessors, including Reginald Scot (The Disco verie of Witchcraft), Baltasar Bekker (LeMonde Enchante), and Pierre Bayle (Reponse aux Questions d'un Provincial) (see extracts in Kors and Peters 314-31, 324-32, 360-68, 369-77). In 1716, Webster was perhaps even more emphatic in his scepticism, showing all such demonic apparitions to be but mental hauntings, as he put it, "ein Hirngespenst" (Halbey 80).
Such is the contemporary, eighteenth-century attitude that we may now presume was likewise shared by both Fuseli and the contemporary Gothic authors of explicitly "demonic" literature. Another result of these findings is to demonstrate that The Nightmare was, just as the rest of Fuseli's publicly exhibited works were, indeed based upon a textual source--in this case however, an easily accessible corpus of literature. Another result is that the comatose lady's "nightmare"--a haunting--may no longer be considered a uniquely private one. In short, since witches have been part of the "public domain" since at least the end of the fifteenth century, and, since they also were copiously illustrated (see: Davidson; Halbey; Purkiss; Sullivan), so was this subject matter clearly available to Fuseli and his late-eighteenth-century audience. Given that die Hexerei is now also the object of much modern scholarship, a further point that may now be addressed is the exact kind of "witchcraft" that was employed by Fuseli in hi s The Nightmare, and this, as I argue here, was specifically "daemonialitas."
It now appears that it is a single published source--The Malleus Maleficarum 'The Hammer of Witches' composed by Heinrich Kramer ("Institor") and Jacob Sprenger, and first published in 1486-87--that best contextually explains the intrinsic significance of many specific motifs encountered in Fuseli's familiar painting. As is now recognized, after its publication, "the Malleus became the chief source of information about witches' activities. [...] All later handbooks of witch-theory, however 'scientitific' or 'anti-Catholic,' looked back to the Malleus as their chief inspiration" (Kors and Peters 105). And the essentially textually inspired features in Fuseli's The Nightmare include the female protagonist, her tormented dream-state, the horse in the background (a mare), its gleaming eyes, and so forth-all corresponding to motifs in The Malleus Maleficarum (as shown in Moffitt, "Malleus").
Chronologically, the execution of Fuseli's painting contextually falls into a sub-movement that has been aptly called "Neoclassical Horrific" by Robert Rosenblum, who also explains that "a new fascination with witchcraft and supernatural terror [is found] in British painting of the later eighteenth century" (11-12)....
|
